


scars and bruises

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Future Fic, Injury Recovery, Touching, cousyfest2k17, post framework
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-27
Updated: 2017-03-27
Packaged: 2018-10-11 14:38:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10467363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: Daisy and Coulson worry being close will get the other hurt.(Written for the Cousy Fest 2017 - prompt: attached)





	

**one**

They keep meeting over and over around medbay. They both go for check ups: Coulson still recovering from spending too much time plugged to the Framework, his kidneys and liver needing monitoring for a few days. And Daisy still has to heal from the gunshots taken before she went into the other virtual world.

He took it easy after waking up and hasn’t read Daisy’s report until much later. Only then he discovers it was a robot copy of himself that had caused one of her injuries.

“It wasn’t you. It’s not your fault,” she says when he tries to bring it up the next time they see each other in medical.

Coulson thinks it’s ironic, because she herself hadn’t wanted to hear those words, and he doesn’t think being brainwashed is any more her fault than having a robot version of yourself hurt people is his. He knows Daisy will never see it that way. She is the kindest person he has met - except with herself.

And perhaps that wasn’t his fault, but he had wanted Daisy to stay - he hadn’t said it in so many words, but he had wanted it enough to hurt - she wouldn’t have been put in danger again. She wouldn’t have these new scars.

How many of her scars had his name on them, accusing him? 

Once he was told he should stay away from Daisy. He always suspected the warning should have gone the other way around.

A few days after he catches her going back to her morning routine, towel in hand, headed for the gym. She still looks tired and shaken, like they all are, but Coulson is glad she is not hiding, avoiding the team.

Her usual top leaves the bandage on her side exposed.

He never had the courage to ask which one of her wounds was caused by someone who looked like him. For a moment Coulson imagines it’s this one.

He stops her in the middle of the hallway, when everything is quiet and the base is still asleep, one hand gently on her hip, the other with its fingers skimming over the injury. He can smell the night on her (she showers afterwards).

He feels her tremble under his touch.

“Does it hurt?” he asks.

Daisy bites her bottom lip. “No, not really.”

In her face there is a naked expression that tells him it’s more complicated than that, and it has nothing to do with pain. Experimentally, he slides his thumb inches above the spot, under her top.

Daisy makes a noise.

He thinks this is dangerous. His connection with Daisy has put her in danger, has caused her pain, many times over. What could happen if he touches her like this?

“Maybe because I knew none of it was real going in,” she says, hushed voice even though there’s no one around, and Coulson guesses she is telling him something very private. “But I couldn’t feel anything back there, in the Framework, I’ve missed…”

That world is a blur of confusion for him, the memories of his other life still inside his head, but fading with every hour. He can’t be certain of much of what happened back there, but he knows she pulled him out of it, and it almost cost her her life. Just because she couldn’t leave him behind, just because -

Daisy backs into a wall, but not pulling away from him, very careful to keep the connection, to make his hand follow her blindly, fingers still pressed on tender flesh. He follows, stepping closer.

“Do you want me to touch you?” he asks, which is an absurd question because he’s already touching her. He means _do you want me to touch you more?_

He applies some more pleasure, and Daisy lets out another moan, and he has his answer.

 

 

**two**

“I like having you all to myself,” she says, burrowing her way under the covers like an animal in winter and taking his hands in hers, kissing the knuckle as hello.

Phil is giving her a skeptical look, “The same goes for me,” he says, because neither of them have the time they’d like for each other, but the Director of SHIELD has less time than he does. He’s normally the one waiting in their room at the end of the day.

More than any other time, this last attack - and the fact that Phil has to keep to their bed for a couple of days, nursing some ugly wounds - makes her wonder what would life be like if they were to get out. Every SHIELD agent wonders that, Phil had told her once. All? Even Fury? He had nodded then. I don’t wonder so much since I’m with you, he had told her. Funny, because Daisy had never wondered before, and she knows she doesn’t really want anything else, she doesn’t mean SHIELD, she means the fight, the thing that leaves them less time than they’d like for each other. 

“This is mine,” she says. She kisses Coulson’s shoulder right besides the healing scar the attackers left.

She touches and prods the wounds, closing her lips over the safest ones, mapping the shape of them with her mouth.

The concern for his state finally gone once the doctors released him to his care and allowed him to take him to a safehouse ten minutes from the base, only the tenderness for his body is left. It’s peaceful in here, together in bed in the middle of the day, but Daisy knows the cost of this kind of peace.

“This bruise too,” she stops over a purple spot on his upper arm. “It’s my fault.”

“It’s not your fault. Just some crazy psychopaths who-”

“Wanted to hurt you because you are close to me. To see what I’d do.”

The ransom had been an exclusive audience with her, to try to kill her. By that time Phil’s body had already paid the price of their connection to each other, or rather his connection to him. It’s hard not to believe one is the cause of harm to your loved ones when one _literally_ is. Gone are the days when Daisy decided to stay away from everything she cared about to protect it - but she still has the same doubts that pushed her to do that.

The room smells of sweat and medicines. A combination that’s complicated for her. She focuses on the “having Phil all for herself” part. She rests her head on his chest carefully, running one hand through the hair. 

“Why do you have more gray hair here and down here than in your head?” she wonders out loud.

She can tell he is smiling by the way the muscles in his stomach shake besides her cheek.

“I’m really enjoying this,” he tells her, the soft breeze of his words against the top of her head. “Maybe I should get kidnapped more often.”

She thumbs his ribcage, where the bruising is not so bad.

“Don’t joke about that. You know I’m really sorry.”

She can tell he is nodding by the way his chin brushes against her hair.

The room stops smelling of medicine so much, and it just smells of him, of them. Giving this up would be impossible - she couldn’t give it up any more than she could give up the fight, or abandon her people.

“I should stay away. Bad things happen to the people I get attached to.”

Is she selfish for not having done the right thing a long time ago?

“You think I wouldn’t get into trouble if we didn’t share a bed?” Phil points out.

It’s not entirely rational - then again, a lot of the stuff in her head isn’t - to think that he would be safe if she wasn’t around.

“You’d be safer if people didn’t know about this,” she says.

“It’s a bit late for that, Quake,” he says softly, threading his fingers into her hair, still getting used to another new haircut.

She turns her head and props herself on her arms, searching for his mouth. His lips are a bit dry and cracked from the drugs, and when Daisy presses her body properly against him to properly kiss him he lets out a noise of startled pain, but it gets swallowed by the pleased moan that follows. He kisses her back and lets her touch him lazily for a long time. When he comes into her hand, quietly in a room full of sunlight, she cleans him up and presses her mouth to the dark patches of skin again, unmapping the shape she had drawn when she first got under the covers.

“It’s all yours,” he says quietly.

“What?”

“All of it,” Coulson explains, holding her against his body the best he can given his injuries. “Not just the scars and the bruises. The rest is all yours, too.”

It’s a bit sappy, but Phil always makes sappy work for him. It still makes her sigh a bit, and roll her eyes a bit, because he should know better, he should be more prudent, he should have been more prudent _years ago_ , instead of tying his fate to some strange, reckless girl.

She smiles against the curiously gray hair on his chest, thinking he’s wonderfully right about this, _it’s a little too late for that now_.


End file.
